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Sen. John McCain pens an opinion piece on Wired:
America's military technological advantage is eroding—and fast.
For the past decade, our adversaries have invested heavily in rapidly improving their militaries to counter our unique advantages. At the same time, the speed of globalization and commercialization means that advanced disruptive technologies are now—and increasingly will be—available to less sophisticated militaries, terrorist groups, and other non-state actors.
Maintaining our military technological advantage is about much more than a larger defense budget or a better fighter or submarine. These things are important, but to give our military the capabilities it needs to defend the nation, the Department of Defense must be able to access innovation in areas such as cyber, robotics, data analytics, miniaturization, and autonomy, innovation that is much more likely to come from Silicon Valley, Austin, or Mesa than Washington.
[...] There are those who say that even with changes like these, our nation's innovators simply aren't interested in doing business with the Pentagon. And after spending much of my career in Washington scrutinizing Pentagon business practices, I am not exactly surprised to hear such sentiments. But in the final analysis, I believe the brightest minds will always be driven to solve the world's toughest problems. These are the problems our military confronts every day. And these are the problems we can solve if we create an acquisition system that enables the Department of Defense to take advantage of the best minds, firms, and technologies that America and the world have to offer.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 11 2015, @03:07PM
Unlike what you might expect from the line "our nation's innovators simply aren't interested in doing business with the Pentagon", there's nothing about addressing hacker mistrust of government/military in there (as if it can be). It's about shoveling more money to Google, SpaceX, etc. and getting his pet changes to the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @12:44AM
This is not about "hacker mistrust of government/military"; there are plenty of programmers more than willing to work for DoD. It is also not about our nation's innovators being disinterested in doing business with the Pentagon. I work for DoD and from my perspective, it seems too often that the DoD is not interested in doing business with our nation's innovators. Or, rather, they are interested but too often they are literally hamstrung by the FAR [wikipedia.org]. I have seen many instances where even the most basic of tasks were completely stymied by various regulations placed upon us; many of these regulations made absolutely no sense in light of what we were trying to accomplish. I even heard one grizzled old timer in our group say that if the current FAR had been in place during WWII we may well have lost the war! So, Sen McCain, if you really want to unleash the innovators of this country to come up with the next generation of capabilities to meet our adversaries on the battle field, may I suggest that you put some thought into streamlining various processes that define how we interface with our industrial partners? This, more than anything, would have great impact on innovation in the defence industry. Also, it really doesn't help when big boondoggles, such as the F-35, are literally being forced by Congress upon an unwilling Pentagon against all advice from the top brass. Maybe you should listen more closely to their advice? Just sayin'.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday June 12 2015, @01:18AM
Another factor I kinda wonder about is location: a lot of these DoD-related jobs seem to be in places which aren't exactly tech hubs, and some of them are actually in rather rural places (because they're in or near military bases, which aren't exactly near Silicon Valley). I wonder if one reason they have a hard time finding qualified people is because they don't want to go live near Fort Such-and-Such in rural Alabama or wherever, and these jobs just aren't located in metro areas with plenty of other tech jobs.